What is the Role of Emotion in Music? Group B Group Members: Paul Batchelder J. Tyler Bentine Samantha Daniels Colin McDowell Bree Russell Lindsey Tinetti Class: EDP101B Introduction Everyday, everywhere we go, there is some kind of music around us. Whether you are walking to class and it’s the birds singing, the kid behind you in class is humming, or you are listening to your iPod, music is everywhere. Whether large or small, some kind of emotion or feeling is attached to each of these types of music. Throughout this paper we will explore five different emotions: sadness, anxiety, anger, love, and excitement. We will look deeper into each of these emotions and detail their relationship to music. While each of these emotions is very different, they all share two similarities in their relationships to music. First, music can be the trigger to these different emotions. Hearing a particular song, beat, or lyric can trigger an emotional response. On the other side of this, music can ease emotions away, like in anger or sadness. Second, music can help some to understand his or her emotions by writing down lyrics and getting his of her feelings out on paper.

Sadness How many times have you been in a sad mood, and as a natural instinct you listen to sad music ultimately making you feel worse? Or how many times has just listening to sad music made you become sad? Music can be used to express feelings and emotions as well as affect us all. People of all ages listen to music in order to change their mood. According to Levitin, “ a cascade of activity from the eardrum to cells deep inside the brain that regulate emotion, is set off whenever we hear music- at weddings, in shopping malls, at dance clubs, at church and even at funerals” (Levitin, 2006).

Music that is played at certain events similar to funerals, movies, breaking up with significant others, and more evoke the emotion of sadness. Due to the efficacy of music, when people want to be in a certain mood, seek reinforcement for a certain mood, feel lonely, or when they seek distraction from their troubles, music tends to be the medium of choice to accomplish the task. Sadness, a negative, depressing feeling that lowers the human spirit might be depicted with slower music, using darker (often minor) harmonies and melodies that primarily fall to mimic the sinking nature of the emotion.

Many people listen to depressing music when they are sad because they feel like they can relate to it. Noting that we don't enjoy feeling sad in reality, yet can enjoy sadness in music, there is a distinction between "life-sadness" and "music-sadness. We can recognize that music evokes emotions indirectly rather than directly. A piece of "sad music" does not normally leave the listener depressed; rather, it induces something of the physiological state which is associated with sadness, or makes us feel that we are in the presence of sadness. Kendall Walton states, “music expressive of sadness induces the listener to imagine herself experiencing sad feelings" (Jenefer Robinson, op. cit., p. 18).

Males and females have been reported using music to affirm or manage their moods; there are some consistent differences in their goals.

Research has shown that males are more likely than females to use music as a tool to increase their energy level and seek stimulation. Although they do so less commonly than females, males will also match music with their negative moods. In the same way that girls often listen to sad songs when they are sad. Listening to music alone can serve as goals and needs related to social relationships. Perhaps that best example of this is when music replaces or invokes the presence of absent peers in order to relieve feelings of loneliness.

In conclusion, music not only has a purpose, but it also relates to everyone and any event going on throughout life. We recognize certain sounds as characteristic of the expression of certain emotions. People today frequently use music as a tool to maintain or change particular moods, and they readily admit that music has direct, profound effects on their emotions.

Anxiety Although many emotions are joyful some are not. Anxiety is not an emotion that people like to experience. Our textbook defines anxiety as “a general feeling of apprehension characterized by behavioral, cognitive, or physiological symptoms” Davis & Palladino (2007). Certain types of music can bring about feelings of anxiety. Differences in tones and tempos can bring about changes in a persons psychological state causing them to have feelings of nervousness and tension. This is one example of the role of emotion in music. Another example would be the role that anxiety has in a therapeutic sense. Many correlations are being made between music and the affect it has on emotion. Interestingly enough, studies are finding that the role of music has a direct effect on reducing feelings of anxiety.

Studies show that anxiety can inhibit patients’ ability to learn new information about their illness. On study done by researchers found that “prior to providing patient education, nurses offered music as an option, asking if a patient if he or she believes music would be helpful in reducing anxiety or improving the learning experience. The intervention would be discussed with the patient and a mutual decision would be made to implement the use of music, therefore increasing the likelihood of success and decreasing a patients feeling of anxiousness” (Richards, Johnson, Sparks, Emerson, 2007). Also, research noted in The sound of healing, correlates the finding of music in relation to reduced anxiety. Robin Lally states that “Music therapy is a unique way to provide emotional and spiritual support, pain management, stress and anxiety reduction for patients…patients and nurses reported that live music during chemotherapy treatments changed the experience from being an institutional and anxious time to a sacred place of healing” Lally (2007).

In regards to Levitin’s This is your brain on music: The science of a human obsession, he too notes a correlation between music and it’s positive effect on reducing feelings of anxiety. Levitin refers a scientist by the name of Crick as well as to information about Crick and his experiments leading to the finding that lesions to particular regions of the cerebellum could cause dramatic changes in arousal. Levitin notes one particular experiment by Crick in which monkeys with lesions to the auditory cortex could be stimulated to reduce anxiety and depression. (Levitin, 2006, pp. 179-181)

As research shows, the relationship between music and the effect it has on our emotions is undeniable. Numerous correlations have been proven through experimentation and study to show that music can lower feelings of anxiety. Hopefully this positive discovery can lead to a more pleasant lifestyle for many people who experience frequent feelings of anxiousness. Anger – Perspective #1 Like anxiety, anger is an unpleasant emotion that humans experience as a result of an external stimulus of some kind. It should be no shock to anyone that there is a lot of music out there that has angry and sometimes hateful lyrics. What is it about this emotion that is so popular in music. A song called St. Anger by Metallica is a great example of anger in music. “In this popular song Metallica delivers a very aggressive message through an incredibly aggressive song. The lyrics convey an interesting concept that ‘st. anger’ is something hung around the singer's neck which is controlling his feelings, just like anger controls us sometimes. “ (Music Therapy in Anger Management, 2007) The way that the singer conveys his message about anger throughout his song appeals to all kinds of listeners who may have felt the same way at some point in time. Anger is such a strong emotion that people often have a strong bond with the words of a song.

Music, “invokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward, and emotion.” (Levitin, 2006, pp. 187) This primitive part of the brain is essential to humans relating to the emotional components of music, such as anger. There are positive uses to the way that music invokes anger in its listeners. Have you ever listened to a song to get you pumped up for a big game? I bet that it wasn’t Mozart was it? When used in a positive manner, the anger inducing properties that music can produce are quite amazing.

Even though music has the ability to invoke the negative emotion of anger, it also has the ability to take it away. “Music may produce expressions of various emotions - peaceful, relaxing, exciting, festive, boring, unsettling, unstimulating, invigorating ... and so on.” (Ramnath, 2000) These other emotions can elicit a response similar to that or anger. So how do you take away anger? You simply replace it with something else. Taming anger with classical music and other appealing types of music is becoming a popular form of anger management because of the extensive results.

Although anger is a negative emotion that can lead to negative actions, there are still some good uses to having angry lyrics in songs that you listen to. Music also can act in a very positive way in taking anger away from listeners as well. This is a great step forward in the lives of people who suffer from anger management issues.

Anger – Perspective #2 One of the greatest things about music is the wide variety of emotions it can convey or ease. Of all our emotions, anger is one of the most basic, yet complicated emotions. Anger is basic because every human being feels it, yet it can be one of the hardest emotions to express, even through music. Our book defines anger as “a strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong” (Davis & Palladino 2007). Throughout history the lyrics in music have been used to convey opinions about current events, especially politics. This is one role of anger in music. The other role of music which deals with anger is in the therapeutic nature of music. The strong connection between the emotion of anger and music exists in two parts. The first being the anger that the lyrics, tones, or rhythm incite. The second being the ability of music to relieve anger. Both of these will be explored further. The first aspect to explore in the role of anger in music is what different types of anger are triggered by the lyrics, tones, or rhythm of the music. When listening to music, these three items can separately or together trigger an angry thought, or if severe enough, an action. The first and largest part of this is the anger that is incited by the lyrics of music. When people write music, they put in a great deal of any emotion into what they are writing, but that will be focused on later. When people listen and interpret the message of the artist, it can often times incite anger. An example of this is during the Vietnam War when many of the songs being written at the time, were political in nature. When people listened to the lyrics, huge problems ensued with the anger over the lyrics of some of the artists. A more recent example is that of the Dixie Chicks. They wrote some very controversial lyrics and consequently many of their fans were angered by what they wrote. They were disagreeing with the actions of the presidents, the war on terror, and situations overseas. These are very controversial issues, so many of their fans were angered over their lyrics.

The next part of the role of anger in music is the kinds of anger that are triggered by the different rhythms and tones of the music. A faster paced song with a more upbeat rhythm is going to get the listen more “pumped up” about something. If the listener was already angry or was going through some problems the faster rhythm would more than likely cause the listener to become more enraged and angry than say if he or she was listening to a slower, more calming song.

In an article of the website Using Music in Therapy, it describes the therapeutic tendencies of music. “It gives people a chance to pour out their heart and soul” is the way the author describes it. The writing of music is personal, and often emotional experience. When a person is experiencing anger, writing down what he or she is feeling/thinking into lyrics can be a very healing activity. In the article Using Music to Communicate, the author describes that angry emotions can often by more easily conveyed and eased through writing music. Putting what someone is feeling on paper can not only help him or her to relieve the anger, but to gather all his or her thoughts into one place and help he or she to fully understand them. The other role of anger in music is the effectiveness of getting angry messages out in a way listeners will understand. The war in Iraq is an easy example. The bands Green Day and U2 have been recently characterized by their angry lyrics that disagree with the US Government’s actions. They put what they were feeling into lyrics and these lyrics in turn made many more people aware of the current political situations.

When looking deeper into the role of anger is music, you can see two distinct parts. The first being the anger incited by the lyrics or antagonized by the rhythm or tone of the music. The second, and in my mind larger part, is that writing music can be very therapeutic in relieving anger.

Love Love tends to be the topic of most songs that come on the radio. These “love songs” can give the listener either a happy, sad, or angry feeling based on the expression of the song or the lyrics. Due to the variety of feelings that songs about love can give, it is hard to track what area of the brain is stimulated when a person has a feeling of love. In one experiment, “subjects exhibited greater relative left frontal EEG activity to joy and happy musical excerpts and greater relative right frontal EEG activity to fear and sad musical excerpts” (Schmidt & Trainor, 2001, p 487). This means that when a love song that gives the listener a positive love feeling more activity should occur in the left frontal EEG, and when a sad love feeling is elicited more activity should occur in the right frontal EEG. This is the reason why it is difficult to pinpoint the location of stimulation for the emotion of love and desire.

Listening to lyrics is not the main reason people think about love when listening to songs. Emotional expressions are the main ingredients for listeners to have intense longings for a romantic love (Greene & Henderson, 2000, p 98). This emotion can come from either the way the lyrics are sung or the melody and the expression of the instruments being played. A good example of music without lyrics expressing feelings of love would be Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Although this can be an opinionated matter, because all music affects individuals in a different way, this song elicits a feeling of happy love. This could be the reason that this song is traditionally played during wedding ceremonies.

One particular reason people, especially adolescents, may have feelings of love when listening to music is the rise of dating as a common activity for teenagers in the 1990s to present (Greene & Henderson, 2000, p 96). This means that the intention of the song may not necessarily be love, but since teenagers tend to have that topic on their minds often anyway the feeling is achieved. A song can also jog a person’s memory of a particular event, even if the expression of the song is not the same as the emotion felt by the individual. For example, if a person hears a happy song when they receive news of a death in the family, that song, when heard at a later time, could make that person feel sad even though the song is about happy things. With love songs all over the radio, it is hard not to have feelings of desire at some point throughout your listening experience.

Excitement I was playing basketball the other day and I wouldn’t have been able to drop twenty points, ten rebounds, and ten assists if it wasn’t for Lil John and the Eastside Boy’s “Get Crunk”. Music plays a huge role in motivating and getting people excited for whatever activities that they have to perform that day.

Dr. Norman M. Weinberger claims: “A capsule summary of the way stress hormones are released into the blood stream is that the brain, sensing stress, ultimately releases ACTH from the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, itself controlled by neural and hormonal messages from its link to the brain, the overlying hypothalamus. When ACTH reaches the adrenal glands, they release adrenaline and cortisol into the blood stream. These have many effects on target organs, including the release of stored glucose for energy, increasing blood flow to the muscles and increasing blood pressure, all as part of a constellation of bodily mobilization for possible action, defense or whatever. One effect of stress hormones is to dampen down the immune system, so that, unfortunately, continual stress can reduce the ability to fight disease. Although this counterintuitive effect of stress hormones is not fully understood, it should not be ignored.” (Norman) Summary of what was said was music has the ability to release adrenaline and get people psyched to perform. That is why in the N.B.A. during pre games, at half time, and now during timeouts they always have some song with a beat playing.

Conclusion Whenever a person listens to some music, some kind of emotional response is invoked. It may not always be large and noticeable, but there is always some kind of reaction. When flipping through the radio in the car, one song may put you in a great mood. When watching a horror movie, the background music puts the viewers on edge. It is the connections between human emotions and music that it is important to understand. In our paper we explored five different emotions: sadness, anxiety, anger, love, and excitement. Each of these emotions is very different, yet at the same time share many similarities in their connections to music. There are two very important connections in the role of emotion in music. The first is the therapeutic and developmental aspect music can have in regards to one’s emotions. By writing music (specifically lyrics) one can get all his or her feelings out, whether publicly or not, and hopefully start to understand them. The largest part of emotion’s role in music is the emotions are triggered or eased by different types of music. A slow song can calm one down, while a faster paced one may excite a person. A song with explicit lyrics may anger one, or with depressing lyrics make one sad. It is important to people understand the role of emotion in music, as it has a strong effect of them. References Davis, S. F. & Palladino, J. J. (2007). Psychology (5th Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Greene, P.D. and Henderson, D.R. (2000). At the crossroads of languages, musics, and emotions in Kathmandu. Popular Music and Society, 24 (3), 95-112.

Lally, Robin M. (2007, Feb). The sounds of healing. ONS Connect, 22, Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.muohio.edu/login.aspx? direct=true&db=aph&AN=24105414&site=ehost-live

Levitin, D.J. (2006). This is your brain on music: The science of a human obsession. New York, NY: Dutton.

Norman, Weinberger. "The Musical Hormone." 1997. Musica. 11 Apr. 2007 .

Ramnath, Bombay J. "The Power of Music." 03 Dec. 2000. 18 Apr. 2007 .

Richards, T, Johnson, J, Sparks, A, & Emerson, H (2007). The effect of music therapy on patients' perception and manifestation of pain, anxiety, and patient satisfaction. Medsurg Nursing, 16, Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.muohio.edu/login.aspx? direct=true&db=aph&AN=24630807&site=ehost-live.

Schmidt, L.A. and Trainor, L.J. (2001). Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) distinguishes valence and intensity of musical emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 15 (4), 487-500.

Worth, S Using Emotion to Communicate. Retrieved April 20, 2007, from 20th WCP: Music, Emotion, and Language: Using music to communciate Web site: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Aest/AestWort.htm